2013年7月2日 星期二

Albert Hirschman (1915-2002)

 2013.1.1整理出架構  2013.7.2補反動的修辭》......




■馬路或飛機
我的朋友赫許曼(Albert Hirschman)發現還有一些其他場合,不容許錯誤也可以是美德。他是位經濟學家,大半輩子都在研究拉丁美洲社會,以及提供意見給這些政府。同時,他也提供建議給非洲新興獨立國家。這些窮國家經常問他一個問題:「我們應該把有限的資源投在馬路上,或是投到空運上?」聽到這樣的問題,經濟學家自然的反應是回答:「馬路」,因為把錢投在開馬路上,可以為當地人民造就工作機會,而且社會上所有階級都可以享受到修路的好處。相反地,成立國家航空公司,需要的是外國的技術,而且航空公司也只對少數搭得起飛機的人有好處。話雖如此,長期的非洲及拉丁美洲實務經驗卻告訴赫許曼,「馬路」通常是錯誤的答案。在現實世界裡,馬路擁有很多項缺點。首先,撥給修路的經費很容易就會落入腐敗的地方官僚口袋中。而且,築馬路也比維修馬路來得容易。因此常見的狀況是,新路在幾年後開始毀壞,但由於崩毀速度是漸進的,所以並不會造成醜聞。於是,修築馬路的最後結果是:生活又回復原來的面貌。當初回答「築路」的經濟學者並沒有為這個國家造就什麼,只除了讓地方官僚的口袋更肥厚些。

接下來,再看看建立國家航空公司在現實世界裡所產生的功效。錢投下去之後,該地便擁有了一批昂貴的飛機、昂貴的機場以及昂貴的儀器設施。當國外技師離開後,當地人勢必得接受訓練,接手操作整個系統。和馬路不同的是,飛機可不會很優雅地損毀。墜機是非常醒目的大事,同時也能令執政者聲望掃地。遇難者又多半是有錢有勢的人,他們的死訊通常不會被忽視。統治者別無選擇。他們一旦擁有一家航空公司,就不得不好好經營它。他們不得不訓練一批鬥志高昂的機械維修幹部,願意準時上工,並以自家的技術為榮。結果,航空公司為這個落後國家所帶來的間接利益,超過它的直接經濟利益。它創造出一批「熟悉嚴格工業規章,而且擁有現代工作道德觀」的國民。而這批國民遲早又會在維修飛機之外,找到其他能發揮個人技巧的工作。於是,「不容許錯誤」的航空業,便成為指導傳統國家邁向現代化的最佳學校,雖然用的是這般矛盾的方式。
但是,關於「不容許錯誤的科技」轉變了世界,並強迫傳統社會改變,這並不是第一回。航空在今日的角色,頗類似航海在工業化之前的角色。英王享利八世——這位史上最殘忍也最聰明的英國君王、修道院破壞者兼大學創建者、殺妻者兼情歌作者、同時也是劍橋三一學院歷代名人的恩人——就深深明白,推進英格蘭現代化最有效率的工具,莫過於成立一支皇家海軍。十八世紀的工業革命之所以會始於英格蘭,始於這個日常生活與經濟雙雙受制於航海文化達三百年的小島,可不是偶然的。當年輕的俄國君主彼得大帝(一位個性酷似享利八世的君王),決定俄國現代化的時機已經屆臨,便為自己安排了一份工作,進入造船廠當學徒。---談「優雅地損毀」戴森『想像的未來』 (IMAGINED WORLD )
*****
1987-88 Tanner Lecture 1988.4.8The Tanner Lectures on Human Values - Page 1 - Google Books Result
Reactionary Rhetoric: The Case of the Perverse Effect

Government and Opposition Volume 28, Issue 3, pages 292–314, July 1993
  Cover: The Rhetoric of Reaction in PAPERBACK

The Rhetoric of Reaction

Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy

Publication: March 1991


With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.
Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used: (1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended; (2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever—will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; (3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments. He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray. Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts. For those who aspire to the genuine dialogue that characterizes a truly democratic society, Hirschman points out that both types of rhetoric function, in effect, as contraptions designed to make debate impossible. In the process, his book makes an original contribution to democratic thought.
The Rhetoric of Reaction is a delightful handbook for all discussions of public affairs, the welfare state, and the history of social, economic, and political thought, whether conducted by ordinary citizens or academics.

Related Links

  • Preface
  • 1. Two Hundred Years of Reactionary Rhetoric
    • Three Reactions and Three Reactionary Theses
    • A Note on the Term “Reaction”
  • 2. The Perversity Thesis
    • The French Revolution and Proclamation of the Perverse Effect
    • Universal Suffrage and Its Alleged Perverse Effects
    • The Poor Laws and the Welfare State
    • Reflections on the Perversity Thesis
  • 3. The Futility Thesis
    • Questioning the Extent of Change Wrought by the French Revolution: Tocqueville
    • Questioning the Extent of Change Likely to Follow from Universal Suffrage: Mosca and Pareto
    • Questioning the Extent to Which the Welfare State Delivers the Goods to the Poor
    • Reflections on the Futility Thesis
  • 4. The Jeopardy Thesis
    • Democracy as a Threat to Liberty
    • The Welfare State as a Threat to Liberty and Democracy
    • Reflections on the Jeopardy Thesis
  • 5. The Three Theses Compared and Combined
    • A Synoptic Table
    • The Comparative Influence of the Theses
    • Some Simple Interactions
    • A More Complex Interaction
  • 6. From Reactionary to Progressive Rhetoric
    • The Synergy Illusion and the Imminent-Danger Thesis
    • “Having History on One’s Side”
    • Counterparts of the Perversity Thesis
  • 7. Beyond Intransigence
    • A Turnabout in Argument?
    • How Not to Argue in a Democracy
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index


反動的修辭吳介明譯台北:新新聞2002/2012?



*****

Albert Hirschman, Optimistic Economist, Dies at 97



Albert O. Hirschman, who in his youth helped rescue thousands of artists and intellectuals from Nazi-occupied France and went on to become an influential economist known for his optimism, died on Dec. 10 in Ewing Township, N.J. He was 97.
United Press International
The economist and author Albert O. Hirschman held academic posts at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. 

His death was confirmed by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Mr. Hirschman spent the latter part of his career. 

Mr. Hirschman pieced together his graduate work in economics in the 1930s while serving as a soldier and something of an insurgent. Born in Germany, he fought on the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War and later joined the French Army in its resistance to the Nazis. 

When France fell in 1940, he became an integral part of a rescue operation led by the journalist Varian Fry that helped more than 2,000 people escape to Spain, among them the artists Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp and the political theorist Hannah Arendt. 

Mr. Hirschman found routes through the Pyrenees Mountains for those who were fleeing and smuggled messages in toothpaste tubes. 

By the early 1940s, he had moved to the United States and enlisted in the Army, which sent him to North Africa and to Italy as part of the Office of Strategic Services. One of his duties was to translate for a German general in an early war crimes trial. Later, he worked with the Federal Reserve Board, focusing on European reconstruction under the Marshall Plan. 

In 1952, he moved to Colombia to be an economic adviser to that impoverished but rapidly developing country. A few years later, he was back in the United States, beginning a 30-year academic career in which he blended economics, politics and culture and held posts at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. He rarely invoked the experiences of his youth in his academic work, but certain themes persisted in both periods of his life. 

Mr. Hirschman argued that social setbacks were essentially an ingredient of progress, that good things eventually come from what he viewed as constructive tensions between private interest and civicmindedness, between quiet compliance and loud protest. 

He ranged widely in his writings, which include geographically specific studies on economic development, like “Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-Making in Latin America.” A broader work was “Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” published in 1970.此書中國有翻譯

That book outlined different ways that people deal with disagreeable rules or situations politically, culturally and professionally. Some might suffer silently out of loyalty, while others raise questions and still others decide to abandon a situation. The theory has been applied to how politically oppressed people might flee a nation as well as why shoppers stop buying a certain product — a retail variation of what Mr. Hirschman called the “exit option.” 

In 2003, William Safire, the columnist for The New York Times who also wrote the On Language column for The New York Times Magazine, led an informal search for the roots of the phrase “exit strategy.” The search led to economists, who pointed to Mr. Hirschman, who denied culpability, sort of. 

“Did he coin the phrase?” Mr. Safire wrote after interviewing Mr. Hirschman. “No; it’s nowhere in his book. He used exit option. ‘It was a somewhat new concept then,’ Hirschman recalls. ‘I used exit to indicate a possibility, a strategy. When you are dissatisfied, you can use your voice option or your exit option. It is not so different from the political use today. Speak up or get out.’ ” 

While many economists were increasingly immersed in statistics, Mr. Hirschman often wrote with a storyteller’s sweep about the behavior of nations, institutions and individuals. At a time when top-down models for stabilizing economies were popular, particularly in developing countries, Mr. Hirschman was inclined toward a kind of chaotic capitalism called disequilibria. 

Mr. Hirschman “thought disequilibria creates problems that you have to solve — and that’s a good thing,” said Jeremy Adelman, a professor of history at Princeton and the author of a biography, “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman,” to be published next year. 

Otto Albert Hirschmann was born on April 7, 1915, in Berlin. (He later changed the order of his given names and dropped one of the n’s from his last name.) His father was a surgeon. His survivors include a daughter, Katia Salomon; four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. His wife of 70 years, the former Sarah Chapiro, died in January. 

Mr. Hirschman was an ardent optimist. He believed, as Mr. Adelman put it, “that even the most seemingly immutable, impossible situations could be solved, that you could change things that seemed unchangeable.” 

But he also said that things sometimes had to get harder before they got better. 

“Somehow we always try to think in terms of having only one thing happen; everything else will coalesce around it, and we’ll come out all right,” Mr. Hirschman said in a transcribed conversation with an anthropologist in 1976. 

He added: “Generally we only have one lever at a time. We only have one ‘new key’ at a time. To try to counteract this sort of thinking is very important. This kind of faddishness has marred all thinking about economic development.” 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 28, 2012

An obituary on Monday about the economist Albert O. Hirschman referred incorrectly to the Office of Strategic Services, in which he served in the 1940s. It was a civilian agency under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; it was not a part of the United States Army.



On Language

Exit Strategy



he Bush administration has begun searching for an exit strategy ,'' wrote NPR's Daniel Schorr in a recent Christian Science Monitor column. He noted that the phrase coming from the Bush White House went in the other direction: ''stay the course.''
Donald Rumsfeld, peppered with questions about when the U.S. forces would leave Iraq, found a creative way to treat the phrase that refused to focus on departure: ''Our exit strategy in Iraq is success.
It's that simple. The objective is not to leave; the objective is to succeed in our mission.''
The penetration of a new phrase is sometimes measured in cartoon captions, especially in The New Yorker. In 1995, a bride-to-be was pictured in a Robert Mankoff cartoon responding to her swain on bended knee: ''O.K., but what's our exit strategy ?'' In 1999, James Stevenson drew a prisoner in a cell asking his cellmate, ''What's your exit strategy ?''
Alistair Cooke, the British-born American commentator whose weekly Letter From America has long added a touch of class to the BBC, took note of the jailbird exit strategists of '99 and observed, ''' Exit strategy ' is one of those simple-sounding, actually menacing catch phrases we've started using about war when it's uncomfortable to think a little deeper and acknowledge something unpleasant.'' He cited others: in harm's way and putting our men at risk .'' He guessed that exit strategy ''came in with the gulf war.''
Those of us in the phrasal etymological dodge cannot rely on anybody's recollection; citations are the thing. My researcher, Kathleen Miller, accepted the mission and enlisted the aid of Fred R. Shapiro, who as editor of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations touches all the scholarly databases. Fred came up with several uses in the late 1970's in business publications. In the Winter 1977 issue of the California Management Review, William Matthews and Wayne Boucher wrote critically of a company that ''continues to attempt to achieve the established objectives -- way past the point at which, if the company had had a 'planned exit strategy ,' it would have decided to terminate the venture.''
At that point I would have emitted a gleeful aha!, but Miller kept coming up with the use of the phrase by economists who cited a seminal 1970 book by Albert O. Hirschman about three strategies: ''Exit, Voice and Loyalty.'' According to a 2001 paper presented at a California conference by the Moscow economist Vadim Radaev, Hirschman postulated three strategies to deal with uncertainty caused by new formal rules: the voice strategist publicly questions the orders, the loyalty strategist complies and the exit strategist avoids the new rules.
At my command (''Get Hirschman, if he hasn't exited''), she found the 88-year-old social scientist where the geniuses hang out, at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Did he coin the phrase? No; it's nowhere in his book. He used exit option. ''It was a somewhat new concept then,'' Hirschman recalls. ''I used exit to indicate a possibility, a strategy. When you are dissatisfied, you can use your voice option or your exit option . It is not so different from the political use today. Speak up or get out.''
That original where's-my-hat sense has changed to ''a blueprint for bailout.'' In political and journalistic use, the phrase's connotation is accusatory: today's question, ''Where is your exit strategy ?'' connotes ''How do you plan to get us out of this mess at a date certain?'' In his answer, Rumsfeld chose to counter that polemical connotation by defining the mission not as exit but as success.
I am still working on stay the course , which appears to be rooted in a nautical metaphor. Send coinage citations to onlanguage@nytimes.com .
TOCQUEVILLE LIVES
What is it about the aforementioned Alistair Cooke that delights and educates the millions around the world who listen to him?
I was reading an essay he wrote in a 1935 issue of The Listener in which he used a letter from one of his British listeners to explain the way it is with Americans. The letter was about a scene in the movie of Dashiell Hammett's ''Thin Man,'' starring Myrna Loy and William Powell. Cooke first describes the scene: ''It is the one in which the wife (Myrna Loy) and her ex-detective husband are the hosts at a very rowdy and casual party which includes detectives, a lawyer, a few journalists, a young university student, a few ex-convicts, a fashionable divorcee. There is a chorus of drunks limply conducting a carol with almost any article of fire irons they can find. A fat man is howling for a long-distance call. There are three or four people chasing each other. You have to assume that at least a dozen wineglasses will be broken, tables scratched, that cigarettes will by this time be quietly punctuating the pattern of every strip of carpet, lace and cushion in the room. The atmosphere is so compelling, in fact, that Myrna Loy is moved to fling her arms around her husband's neck and confess weakly, 'What I like about you, darling, is you have such charming friends.' ''
Cooke then quotes from his correspondent's letter: ''However congenial or revolting the whole group seems to you personally, there is one astounding fact about that party. It is the way it is conducted. Can you think offhand of any English couple you know who, faced with that motley crew, wouldn't have given in, refused to serve people drinks, turned somebody out, felt their dignity wounded, or had a bitter quarrel about it afterwards? On the contrary, the good temper, the easy flippancy, the quick alert manners, the indifference to the good looks of their household; above all, the smooth indifference to this howling mix-up of social classes -- all this was taken so much for granted that in the middle of laughing I nearly forgot to notice it. But now I should call it, and I'm choosing my words carefully, a quality of breeding that probably no other race possesses.''
''At a later time,'' Cooke wrote, ''I shall try to suggest why it is possible in America for social classes to mingle freely and vitally and yet without sentimentality -- the reason is in the language.''
He has been using that language with grace, wit and precision to skewer linguistic pomposity and to explain our common language all during that ''later time'' -- which has taken him to his 95th birthday. He's still going strong. You can read him, even hear him, on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/letter_from_america .




bookjacket

Worldly Philosopher:
The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
Jeremy Adelman

Cloth | April 2013 | $39.95 / £27.95 | ISBN: 9780691155678
768 pp. | 6 x 9 | 39 halftones.
eBook | April 2013 | $39.95 | ISBN: 9781400846849
Where to buy this ebook
Shopping Cart | Endorsements
Worldly Philosopher chronicles the times and writings of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the twentieth century's most original and provocative thinkers. In this gripping biography, Jeremy Adelman tells the story of a man shaped by modern horrors and hopes, a worldly intellectual who fought for and wrote in defense of the values of tolerance and change.
Born in Berlin in 1915, Hirschman grew up amid the promise and turmoil of the Weimar era, but fled Germany when the Nazis seized power in 1933. Amid hardship and personal tragedy, he volunteered to fight against the fascists in Spain and helped many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals escape to America after France fell to Hitler. His intellectual career led him to Paris, London, and Trieste, and to academic appointments at Columbia, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was an influential adviser to governments in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, as well as major foundations and the World Bank. Along the way, he wrote some of the most innovative and important books in economics, the social sciences, and the history of ideas.
Throughout, he remained committed to his belief that reform is possible, even in the darkest of times.
This is the first major account of Hirschman's remarkable life, and a tale of the twentieth century as seen through the story of an astute and passionate observer. Adelman's riveting narrative traces how Hirschman's personal experiences shaped his unique intellectual perspective, and how his enduring legacy is one of hope, open-mindedness, and practical idealism.
Jeremy Adelman is the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture and director of the Council for International Teaching and Research at Princeton University. His books include Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton)

Endorsement:
"This is an exceptional book. Hirschman's intellectual and political journey is described with sharpness and perspicacity. Family life, cultural encounters, and the imprints of a lifetime highlight the importance and significance of one of the most creative intellectuals of the twentieth century, who had a profound influence on so many people around the world, including myself."--Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil
"Worldly Philosopher is a brilliant book. It is at once a thrilling story, an inspiring and melancholy intellectual biography, and a history of the shifting involvements of social science in twentieth-century public life."--Emma Rothschild, author of The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History

"Albert Hirschman is one of the most distinguished social scientists of the past half century. He has led an exciting and exemplary life, and Jeremy Adelman has researched and written an exhaustive biography. We are all in Adelman's debt for having followed Hirschman's journey, thoroughly and with sympathy."--Charles S. Maier, author of Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors

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